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Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

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Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

#141

Post by scallaway »

digitalsushi wrote: post #58

The red tape is garroting us. My wife's dev environment VMs are 'remediated' at 8pm regardless if she's using them or not - there is no override policy - and the company is singing the success story of saving 40 dollars in licensing. At another corporation, it can take several weeks to learn how to fill out the IAM role and permission boundaries to allow a new app to run - and a governance board has to review it and…

You've summed that up absolutely beautifully.

The core fundamentals that make development enjoyable and sustainable are being ripped away from us, insidiously.

Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

#142

Post by georgemcbay »

steve1977 wrote: post #32

> I work mostly with Javascript — and that doesn’t help. Yup. I would even say it's probably the root cause. Stop working with JavaScript.

I can't personally say with any sort of authority if JavaScript is the root cause of OP's dilemma because beyond a brief stint coding in JavaScript for Yahoo Widgets on early "Smart TVs" (due to a rather unexpected series of events) I haven't used JS regularly for any extended period of time, but I can say that I'm 49 and still really enjoy coding (these days mostly in Kotlin/Android and Go), so I can say falling out of love with coding as you age isn't universal.

Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

#143

Post by ryanianian »

Moving to a farm or giving up on the industry for this is basically saying the tools are hurting more than helping.

Tool fatigue is real. Most companies and developers do not invest in their SDLC. So you end up with a system where even a small change can require outsized effort leading to burnout. Tool fatigue is real.

Many libraries/languages/frameworks encourage a simple, vanilla SDLC. Think `rails` or `poetry` or `make`. But rarely does that scale once a project gets more than two developers, more than one repo, or more than one way of declaring dependencies. Everything turns into a snowflake script running a build-system integrated with hundreds of yaml files spreading out over repos and toolchains. Good luck doing fast end-to-end iteration on a change to something three layers deep in your dependency stack.

I wish the industry would try to solve this in a way that doesn't have vendor, language, or cloud lock-in.

Maybe some combination of containers, nix, asdf, and bazel or something. It doesn't seem that hard to be honest, just requires some innovation and resources to find and execute on an extensible and sane SDLC toolkit.

Until then: Find a way to iterate on your core problem. Become a jedi in at least your smaller domain. Focus on developer productivity. Make it easy to make a change. If it's not, find out why, and solve that problem exactly once rather than having to solve it for every change. Easier said than done. Often times it's politics and momentum that you'll have to overcome. Hopefully your company values this work.

Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

#144

Post by anonymoose33282 »

didgetmaster wrote: post #135
digitalsushi wrote: post #58

The red tape is garroting us. My wife's dev environment VMs are 'remediated' at 8pm regardless if she's using them or not - there is no override policy - and the company is singing the success story of saving 40 dollars in licensing. At another corporation, it can take several weeks to learn how to fill out the IAM role and permission boundaries to allow a new app to run - and a governance board has to review it and…

Programming isn't the only career that is having its soul crushed by red tape. My wife is a doctor and these days about half of her time is spent filling out forms and jumping through bureaucratic hoops instead of actually serving her patients. It is amazing how many nurses, admins, and others around her are constantly trying to figure out how to navigate the system to get any real work done. Every profession needs t…

I remember in 2017 I went to my GP in the US for a physical + bloodwork, and when I said what I was there for, the doctor recoiled a bit – because allegedly I had been booked for a 15 minute slot, rather than 30. And there was no way to do everything in 15 minutes.

I had no idea such a thing even existed. Sure, there's a schedule to appointments and you can't just take all the doctor's time, but I had never ever heard of anything like that. As if at 15:01 into the examination, we'd both turn into pumpkins or something. Or the idea that really any health problem someone had could be observed, diagnosed, and treated in a quarter hour.

Turns out that the hospital system she worked in had been aquired by nameless-faceless-health-conglomerate, and that's how they (and many other) hospitals worked now. Everything was KPIs, everything was maximizing people-in-and-out every day.

When I asked the doctor how she felt about it she obviously tried to be as democratic as possible about voicing her displeasure at the new system. Annnnnnd about 6 months after that, she transferred to working at a senior living facility where she just gets to chat with elderly people all day, refill their prescriptions, and make sure they stay healthy.

Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

#145

Post by weatherlite »

I know its difficult but we should all try to appreciate our jobs and look at the bright side of things. I know its not all roses but consider that with the tech recession, budget cuts, offshoring and now tools like ChatGPT/AI one cannot take for granted being hired as a developer and getting a decent salary (in some parts of the world way more than decent).

Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

#146

Post by janetacarr »

time0ut wrote: post #96
digitalsushi wrote: post #58

The red tape is garroting us. My wife's dev environment VMs are 'remediated' at 8pm regardless if she's using them or not - there is no override policy - and the company is singing the success story of saving 40 dollars in licensing. At another corporation, it can take several weeks to learn how to fill out the IAM role and permission boundaries to allow a new app to run - and a governance board has to review it and…

This sounds so much like my company. Add in that management will make commitments to customers without having any idea what it will take to execute, schedule 20 hours of meetings per week, expect us to work a total of 60-80 hours a week to meet the arbitrary schedule, and also change priorities seemingly at random based on which customer is making the most noise. The best part is HR regularly talks about how we are a…

> I'd quit but equity...

From what I've seen, those golden handcuffs are usually gold-plated handcuffs with the same steel underneath.

Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

#147

Post by pg5 »

dom96 wrote: post #120
digitalsushi wrote: post #58

The red tape is garroting us. My wife's dev environment VMs are 'remediated' at 8pm regardless if she's using them or not - there is no override policy - and the company is singing the success story of saving 40 dollars in licensing. At another corporation, it can take several weeks to learn how to fill out the IAM role and permission boundaries to allow a new app to run - and a governance board has to review it and…

It makes me wonder whether companies should consider hiring more people dedicated to dealing with the red tape to unblock engineers. I suppose managers to a certain extent are the ones doing this work, but in many cases it's not enough, how about a new role that is dedicated to cutting the red tape?

If your managers aren't doing that, they're neglecting their duties

Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

#148

Post by shoshincl »

Hello mate. I learned to code at 13 like 20 years ago as hobby. 15 years ago I started building digital product/startups but sadly no one took of the ground. 10 years ago I started my first job in software development and yesterday was my first day as pizzaiolo. It was a hard take, my income is now cut by at least 5 times but my happiness is higher than ever before. I closed down the door no to coding but working on tech. I need to shut down the computer for a while to feel back the love for programming/building digital stuff. I ll be back to coding to work on some side hustle while having fun and not for a f*cking salary.

Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

#149

Post by trynewideas »

actsasbuffoon wrote: post #12

That doesn’t sound like you’re falling out of love with programming. It sounds like you’re frustrated with the red tape at work. Try working on something fun on the side. Make a game, or a mobile app, or something you’ve always been curious about that doesn’t have anything to do with your job. You might be amazed by how productive you feel when you work on something ambitious that doesn’t involve all of the corporate…

OP is frustrated with flaky and constantly changing tools, silent breaking bugs, poorly documented libraries that change capriciously, and unhelpful IDEs, all connected to and reliant on badly behaving services. Why is game development different? My experiences with the larger or more popular publicly available engines available haven't suggested that.

Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding

#150

Post by hacb »

digitalsushi wrote: post #58

The red tape is garroting us. My wife's dev environment VMs are 'remediated' at 8pm regardless if she's using them or not - there is no override policy - and the company is singing the success story of saving 40 dollars in licensing. At another corporation, it can take several weeks to learn how to fill out the IAM role and permission boundaries to allow a new app to run - and a governance board has to review it and…

Fun to read this comment, as I'm part of the team that deployed the exact same measure as for your wife: we now shutdown dev environments each day at 8PM. We decided to do so because over the weeks, we saw that a lot of devs "forgot" about their dev envs and they were up & running for 6+ months for absolutely nothing. On the other side, we are constantly requested to reduce infra costs, and dev environments (even unused) cost a lot.

In the end, I'm glad we deployed this.

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